How High-End Juices Extract Money From Consumers

By Anna Bahr

Aug. 14, 2014

I usually make my coffee at home. Otherwise, I resort to the machine in the nearest office kitchen that produces terrible espresso from those hermetically sealed ground-coffee pods. But every once in a while I yield to absurd Midtown Manhattan coffee prices and buy a delicious, extortionate latte.

When I went to Dean & DeLuca last week, I spotted “cold pressed juice.” The 16-ounce bottle listed its ingredients: kale, apple, mint, lemon and ginger. I had never purchased one of these juices before, but enough bickering trend pieces havebeenwritten about the stupidity or sanctity of the trend that I understood the general concept of the juice: Reset your metabolism, drink your calories, swap lunch for liquid.

I handed over my credit card and the bottle of Joni Juice and learned something more startling about the impact of these juices. The cashier handed me the receipt. It cost $12. I gasped and requested a price check. He said, “I’m sorry, I should have warned you.”

That juice cost 6 cents per calorie. At this rate, filling my daily calorie requirement would cost $132. The average American family spends a little over $20 each day on food.

The tiny juice cart that sits on the curb a few feet from Dean & DeLuca on 40th Street blends fruits and vegetables with no additives. A 16-ounce drink containing two carrots, a beet, 1.5 apples and a slice of ginger (a concoction not unlike Joni Juice’s “Beet Me” drink) cost only $4 for around 263 healthy calories — about 1.5 cents per calorie.

At McDonald’s, the closest thing to a pressed juice comes from the restaurant’s smoothie selection, where a 16-ounce strawberry banana smoothie contains 250 calories and costs $2.89. Not the healthiest choice in the fruit juice universe, but you pay about one cent for each calorie.

Although deviating even further from a goal of a healthy drink, a peanut butter shake at Shake Shack buys twice as many calories per cent.

According to the American Heart Association, adult women should consume no more than 25 grams of added sugar per day. The ingredient list of the 16-ounce McDonald’s smoothie includes words like “purée,” “concentrate,” “powder” and “artificial,” while the drink contains 54 grams of sugar. A can of Coca-Cola, by comparison, contains just 39 grams.

The 16-ounce Joni Juice is a bit healthier, in terms of sugar: It has 36 grams. Guidelines for sugar consumption published by the United States Department of Agriculture explicitly recommend limiting only added sugars (sweeteners added to foods during processing or preparation). The tiny triangle at the top of the food guide pyramid refers only to these added sugars, not the fructose that is intrinsic to the pressed produce of Joni Juice. The juice would fit instead on the fruit and vegetable level of the pyramid, although lacking the fiber of the whole fruit.

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A juice cart in front of The New York Times building in Midtown Manhattan.CreditAndrew Renneisen/The New York Times

The other product advertised by Dean & DeLuca as part of its “GetFit” package was Koa. Water made from juice, it sells for $4.50 per bottle, tastes like water and, like Joni Juice, advertises “the healthy part squeezed from 12 fresh fruits and veggies.” But it has no calories. So it’s something like buying a diet soda for the same price as its full-calorie sibling; you are paying for something with the nutritional value of water.

Of course, buying food with “the healthy part” extracted and packaged is reserved for the wealthy. Fresh fruits and vegetables, whether juiced or whole, cost more than their less healthy, calorific alternatives.

Someone relying on the average food stamp allowance of $4.50 per day is likely to buy the most filling food such a small sum can cover, which helps explain why many poor Americans eat unhealthily.

When a low-income person with diabetes must choose between paying for his medication or buying a vegetable-heavy dinner, he might decide to rely on inexpensive and high-energy density food, like a Double Cheeseburger at McDonald’s, which costs only $1.19 (about 0.31 cents per calorie).

By contrast, a head of lettuce costs $1.50 — nearly 3 cents for every calorie — and is not, by any measure, a square meal.

Buying cold-pressed juice could test even the more flexible budgets of average Americans. In 2012, Gallup reported the average daily food expenditure of families in the United States to be around $21.57. After buying a Joni Juice, a family would have only about $10 left to spend.

If your budget includes fresh produce, your wallet and calorie index are worse off if buying vegetables in juice form. According to the prices listed at FreshDirect, the home-delivery grocery service, buying the raw produce contained in a single “Give Me Greens” juice would cost, at most, around $9.

Of course, without pulverizing the fruits and vegetables for optimal juice-to-pulp ratio, you consume around 120 additional calories. But a salad with the equivalent contents (kale, apple, ginger and lemon) costs three cents per calorie, instead of six. More important, the salad will most likely keep you full longer than its liquid counterpart.

Forty minutes after my 16 ounces of “Give Me Greens” juice, which tasted like sweet grass, I was ravenous. So I went to the vending machine, where assorted change from the bottom of my purse bought me a granola bar that cost 0.65 cents per calorie, contained a little less than half of the grams allotted for my daily sugar intake and kept me full until lunch.

But I am an outlier in the juicer consumer market. For people regularly drinking pressed juice, cost per calorie is probably an irrelevant measure. The people who drink it aren’t buying granola bars when hunger strikes — they’re buying more juice. According to Henry Kasindorf, a partner in Joni Juice, the company, which was founded in February of this year, is nearly doubling in size each month.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the average sum of money spent per day by Americans on food, as reported by Gallup. It is $21.57 per day for an American family, not for an individual.